Tag: Introduction

An Introduction to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Paid Marketing

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Your brand has the power to reach millions of people around the world, and it only takes a few minutes to do. The power of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is incredible, with a huge reach and the ability to target specific audiences.

How can you make the most of it?

Investing in PPC can bring a great return for your business (it’s thought paid advertising returns $2 for every $1 invested), but it’s also an easy way to lose money if you don’t approach it in the right way.

To help make sure you’re getting your PPC right, here’s my introduction to pay-per-click marketing.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing?

Pay-per-click is a common advertising model in internet marketing. It allows advertisers to place ads on search engines, social media platforms, and third-party websites, paying a fee whenever the ad is clicked.

Example of a pay-per-click ad on Google

Generating over $134 billion in ad revenue, Google is the largest provider of PPC services. Its platform, Google Ads, is often the first stop for people beginning PPC marketing.

How Much is PPC Advertising?

Whenever you invest in advertising, you want to know how much it’s going to cost you. With PPC, this is a little complicated.

Online advertising isn’t like taking out an ad in a magazine, where you pay a fee and you get a full-cover page. Instead, with PPC, you pay when you get results (someone clicking your ad).

However, with offline advertising, you tend to pay a set fee regardless of the results you achieve. With PPC, you’ve got more control over how much each truly engaged consumer costs you.

This plays out through an auction system. Unlike a traditional auction, though, there isn’t one product with one winner—you’re bidding on how high up and how often your ad could be visible. “Losing” the auction doesn’t necessarily mean you get no PPC space—it means you get less.

Whenever a user searches for a certain keyword, say “PPC Marketing,” Google looks through its list of advertisers for this word and initiates an auction between them. A Google algorithm then chooses ads based on each advertiser’s maximum bid and the quality score of each ad.

The big takeaway from this is that it’s not just about how much you bid. The quality of your ad plays a huge part as well.

That said, if your max bid isn’t realistic, then your ads aren’t going to be shown often enough to be worthwhile. Different keywords have different average costs per click, and this should inform your bidding strategy.

Tools such as Ubersuggest and Google Ads Keyword Planner could give you a good feel for how much your ads are likely to cost, so they should play a role in your keyword research.

Is PPC Marketing Right for My Company?

Like any form of marketing, pay-per-click advertising has its pros and cons. Ideally, your company will use PPC as part of a complete digital marketing strategy, so you maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.

Pros of PPC Marketing

  • Immediate results: As soon as your ads are approved, they will reach your target audience.
  • Highly targeted: You can be extremely specific about who sees your ads.
  • Easy to track: You can quickly track the success of your campaign and measure your ROI.
  • Potentially huge exposure: Paid ads are prominently displayed, with the potential to reach a virtually unlimited number of people.

Cons of PPC Marketing

  • Costly long-term option: You have to pay for every click, leaving you in the hands of advertising pricing. If you do this for months or years, it’ll add up.
  • Not building an asset: When you invest in content marketing or building an email list, you’re creating an asset you own. With PPC, your success is reliant on continued ad spend.

This is why my own digital marketing agency works to create a well-rounded digital marketing plan for your business. PPC has some amazing benefits, but you need good marketing in other areas as well.

PPC isn’t a replacement for organic SEO. The two should complement each other, with organic work taking a good amount of your focus because those clicks are free.

Six Steps to Starting a PPC Marketing Campaign

Starting your first PPC marketing campaign may feel surprisingly simple—you could do it in just six steps. Remember, ad quality plays a large part in your campaign’s success, so make sure you take your time and focus on each step.

1. Figure Out Your PPC Budget

How much do you want to spend on your pay-per-click marketing?

To begin with, you need to set an initial budget to allow you to test the waters. As a rough guide, you can look at some industry benchmarks to understand how much you’re likely to pay for each conversion.

Once you have an overall budget in mind, daily and lifetime spend caps for your campaigns.

This is an important part of creating a PPC campaign because your budget will greatly impact your ads’ success rates. Google Ads gives you good tools to help with this, and it’s worth following Google’s recommendations because its algorithms are designed to maximize your return.

You’ll be able to see an estimate of how many clicks your budget is likely to get you. From there, you can work out your potential return on investment based on your anticipated conversion rate.

If your budget doesn’t allow you to get meaningful results, it might be worth looking at some alternative marketing methods.

2. Set Your Campaign Goals

Different businesses will have different goals for their pay-per-click campaigns.

For example, if you’re doing a pre-launch for a start-up, your goal might be to drive traffic to the site and create awareness. If you’re selling a product, your main goal may be conversions.

The goals you set will have a big impact on your marketing campaign because each goal has a different value. A click isn’t as valuable as a lead or a conversion, and your cost-per-click should reflect this.

Setting up your campaign with the right goals allows you to better target the correct audience and accurately measure your return on investment. You’re paying for the click, not what the customer does afterward, when you use PPC—the click costs the same whether they purchase or not.

Consider who you want to click your ad and what actions you want them to take. When you understand this, optimize your entire campaign to encourage people to take those actions, which should bring down your costs.

3. Figure Out What Type of Campaign to Run

Another element to think about with PPC is what type of campaign you’re going to run. There are lots of options here, each giving you flexibility over how you reach your target audience:

  • Search ads: Ads showing at the top of search engines
  • Social ads: Ads on social media platforms
  • Remarketing ads: Ads that target people who have already visited your website
  • E-commerce ads: Ads on Google shopping that are focused on selling products
  • Instream ads: Commonly seen on YouTube, played before a video loads
  • Display ads: Dynamic ads showing on third-party websites, like in the image below

All these options give you the tools you need to target specific audiences. You need to find out where your audience hangs out and what they respond to. This will change depending on the buyer personas you’re trying to reach.

You don’t have to commit to one particular type of ad, and many businesses find a mix of different ad formats works best for them. However, it’s important to keep your eye on your ROI for each ad type so you can tweak your strategy accordingly.

4. Research Your Keywords

Keywords are one of the main tools you’ll use to target your audience, and your keyword research can make or break your campaign.

While you probably have a reasonable idea of how your customers search for your products or services, you need to narrow them down to those that result in people taking action.

A big part of this is understanding user intent. For example, who is more likely to make a purchase: someone searching “what is SEO?” or someone searching for “best keyword research tool?”

It’s probably the second one because of where that search fits into the buyer’s journey. Where people are in the buyer journey dictates how likely they are to make a purchase, so the keywords you choose need to reflect which stage you’re targeting.

Keywords that attract people who are further along in the buying process will generally cost you more, but they’re also more likely to lead to conversions.

5. Bid On Your Chosen Keywords

Most platforms give you different bidding options based on your goals. With Google Ads, this allows you to optimize for:

  • target CPA (cost per action)
  • target ROAS (return on ad spend)
  • maximize clicks
  • maximize conversions
  • maximize conversion value
  • target impression share
Pay-per-click marketing - Google Ads

Google will automatically bid on your behalf so it can optimize for your desired goal, but you still have some control over your bid. If you optimize to maximize clicks, for example, you can set a maximum bid. If you maximize for conversions, you can set a target cost per action.

It’s important to remember Google is there to help you get the most out of your ad spend. The algorithms are finely tuned to achieve this. It’s often wise to use Google’s recommendations, especially when starting out.

6. Create Keyword-focused Copy With Unique Landing Pages

Getting people to click your ads is only a small part of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s what happens when people land on your page that’s key.

No matter what your goals are, you need unique, engaging landing pages to achieve them.

Your landing pages need to offer a good user experience and be relevant to the ad the user clicked. People want quick access to the information they’re looking for, and if your landing page isn’t relevant to their keywords, they won’t hesitate to click back to Google.

In short, your PPC landing pages need to be optimized and A/B tested to make sure you’re getting the most out of them.

Conclusion

Pay-per-click advertising is an amazing way to reach a highly-targeted audience quickly. Through platforms such as Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and many more, you can set up paid ads in seconds. Once approved, they could be seen by tens of thousands of people, depending on your budget.

While reaching your target audience is vitally important in marketing, the most important thing is what you do when you have people’s attention. This is why you need to give your paid campaigns the care and attention they need or find a company to do it for you.

When you find the right balance with PPC and have your ads perfectly optimized, it can bring you an excellent return on investment and become a vital part of your digital marketing weaponry.

Is pay-per-click advertising a great earner for your business?

An Introduction to Yelp Ads for Local and e-Commerce Businesses

If you own a business, you know word of mouth is vital to your success.

A glowing review from a handful of customers, or even just one influential somebody, can put your business on the map. And a bad review? Well, that can ruin your reputation. Or at least put a good dent in it.

Before you worry about good or bad, you first need a place to get those reviews.

Here are a few questions to ponder:

  • How can you, as a local business, stand out among your competitors?
  • How can you attract the customer base you want, while also collecting reviews and ratings in one place?
  • Most importantly, how can you interact with consumer reviews to put your business in the best possible light?

Let’s take a closer look at Yelp Ads, Yelp’s various other services, and how they may help.

What is Yelp?

A crowd-sourced business review platform for consumers, Yelp is also an excellent place for businesses to be found online.

Yelp prides itself on being the leading social network for consumer ratings and reviews. 

In its earlier days, the platform was solely consumer-focused. It was a place for customers to leave their reviews without any expectation of a business’s response. 

Yelp has expanded its platform in recent years with Yelp for Business, which gives business owners like you greater control over your listings and consumer interactions. These features go beyond the free page listing that any business can claim.

Yelp for Business Options

Yelp for Business offers two options: self-service and a contract plan.

Self-service is an à la carte offering that allows you to choose from Yelp’s premium business tools. These include:

  • Yelp Ads
  • Yelp Deals
  • Yelp Reservations
  • Business Highlights
  • Profile upgrades

If you choose the contract plan, you’ll work with a Yelp sales representative to create an advertising program that fits your business’s needs. You pay a monthly fee for all the services included in your plan.

Why Yelp for Business May Be Right for Your Business

There’s no doubt that Yelp’s higher-than-average cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille (CPM) have garnered some negative press.

So why might you consider Yelp as part of your overall marketing strategy? 

Yelp users are at a later stage in the buying cycle than those on Google or Bing. Consumers on Yelp are no longer looking for information about a service or product; they’re narrowing their focus to local businesses to make a purchase.

According to a Nielsen study, a whopping 82 percent of Yelp users intend to buy a service or product. So even if only a few hundred consumers per month see your ad, the likelihood of your ad being displayed to a potential customer is high.

Let’s look more closely at one of Yelp for Business’s key offerings: Yelp Ads.

What is Yelp Ads?

An advertising service exclusively targeting Yelp users, this feature displays advertisements to consumers on the platform’s search results pages and business pages, via desktop and mobile. 

How Does Yelp Ads Work?

You can create standard or custom ads linked to your business listing.

The standard ad looks like any search result on Yelp. The difference is it will appear at the top of search page results and on competitors’ profiles:

Yelp Ads SERP review

With custom ads, you can add text snippets, choose a photo, and select the customer review you’d like to feature:

Yelp business listing ad

You can also add value propositions to the bottom of your advertisements, such as sale and deal details or average response time. These are called Business Highlights, and they may be included in your Yelp for Business package or purchased separately.

Yelp local ad

Don’t forget your call to action (CTA). With this add-on feature, you can customize the CTA buttons on your listing page and at the bottom of your search result listings. This allows you to link directly to a relevant page or form on your website.

Like Google or Bing, your ads will display based on search terms, location, and other parameters determined by Yelp’s ranking algorithm.

Your ads can appear on relevant search result pages or competitor business pages across all Yelp platforms. These include the desktop site, the mobile site, and the mobile application (available on iOS and Android).

How to Get Started with Yelp Ads

Do you think Yelp Ads might be right for your business? Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: Claim Your Free Business Listing

If your business is well established, the odds are good that a listing already exists. To claim an existing listing, follow Yelp’s step-by-step instructions.

If your business doesn’t have a listing, it’s easy to register. 

Step 2: Improve Your Profile

Your profile, also known as a Business Page, is your way to provide accurate information about your business to local consumers. Available fields include business hours, address, phone number, and a list of services and products.

The more accurate your profile is, the greater your chances of converting consumers who find your listing. 

Step 3: Moderate Ratings and Reviews

As a verified business owner, you can respond to ratings and reviews publicly or privately. While you may be tempted to ignore a negative review, this can have a detrimental effect on how consumers view your business.

If you want to keep your business’s online reputation positive, promptly respond to reviews—both positive and negative. 

With 71 percent of consumers saying they’re more likely to do business with a company that has responded to reviews, you can’t afford to miss out on this opportunity.

Step 4: Reach Out to a Yelp Sales Representative

When you choose the self-service option, you can immediately begin using Yelp Ads and other premium features. If you’d prefer a customized plan, you’ll need to work with a sales representative.

How to Optimize Yelp Ads for Your Local e-Commerce Business

In its early years, Yelp gained popularity in the restaurant industry. But as of June 2020, restaurants make up just 18 percent of businesses on the platform. Shopping isn’t too far behind, with 16 percent of companies categorized as such.

As a local e-commerce business, you, too, can benefit from Yelp’s various features. 

Run Location-Targeted Advertisements

If you’re not reaching the right audience, what’s the point?

With Yelp Ads, you can run targeted ads based on consumer location.

As a local business, why might you want to target non-local as well as local consumers? I’m glad you asked!

Let’s say you own a hybrid business, online and in-store. Your physical storefront is in Connecticut, but your dropship warehouse is in Texas. 

Instead of mentioning delivery times, a local Connecticut ad might focus on customers’ ability to purchase online and pick up in-store:

Order online. Pick up in-store today.

But a local Texas ad aimed at customers within a few hundred miles of your warehouse location may read:

Delivery within two business days. Guaranteed.

The same can apply to local businesses like florists and bookstores. Even if you don’t ship to locations outside your local area, you can still appeal to non-local consumers with services you do offer.

Let’s say you’re a florist who offers local delivery services in Albany, NY. Your ads to non-local consumers may look something like this:

Call now for free, next-day delivery within Albany, NY.

But how can you advertise to the right audience?

Target larger metropolitan areas around your locale, or use existing customer data to determine the most likely locations for your non-local consumers. 

Keep Your Business Page Updated

With full control over your business page,  include as much relevant information as possible. 

What does this look like?

Did your business hours change? Or maybe you’re running a sale over the next week. This insight is the kind of information potential customers want to know.

yelp business highlights

Don’t have a physical storefront? You still have plenty of opportunities to flesh out your profile. For example, you can update your business’s:

  • customer service hours
  • refund and replacement policy
  • quality guarantee; or
  • shipping and handling timeframes.

Your customers will appreciate the transparency.

Tweak Your Strategy As Needed

Whether your business is brick-and-mortar or online, adaptability is crucial to success. How are you adapting to the results from your latest Yelp Ads campaign?

You may already use analytics software such as Google Analytics on your website. As a Yelp Ads user, you also have insight into campaign metrics, including:

  • user views
  • customer leads
  • mobile calls
  • CTA clicks
  • directions and map views
  • clicks to your website.

Keep track of campaign metrics, and use that data to adjust your ads and overall strategy. The key is to take a solutions-based approach to your advertising campaign. Here are a few examples.

Low Conversion Rate

You’ve started a new targeted campaign for a nearby metropolitan area. The CTA clicks are the highest you’ve ever seen on a campaign, but the conversion rate is abysmal.

The good news? Your campaign is sending people to your website. The bad news? The likely culprit is the landing page itself. You have three options:

  1. tweak the CTA text to reflect the information on your landing page more accurately
  2. link to a more relevant landing page on your website
  3. rewrite the copy on your landing page to encourage more conversions

Remember that Yelp Ads is just one step on your journey toward conversions. 

Targeted ads can help drive relevant traffic to your website, but if your website is lacking, you’re more likely to lose the conversion.

Low Customer Lead Rate

Now let’s say user views are high, but customer leads are low. What’s the deal? 

First, rule out the usual suspects such as out-of-date profile information and poor ratings or reviews.

Next, consider that your potential customers may be drawn away by sponsored ads on your business profile.

One way to combat this is to purchase a package that enables you to remove sponsored ads from your business page. You may also want to place additional value propositions and CTAs higher on your page, so users are more likely to interact with your website before they even see the sponsored ads below.

Conclusion

For many consumers, Yelp is more than just a ratings and reviews platform. It’s the search engine of choice when it comes to finding a local business for their needs.

You may be thinking, “It’s too late in the game to rank anywhere near the first page in Yelp local results. What’s the point?”

But that’s the beauty of Yelp Ads!

You can ensure your listing is at the top of the search page results every time. And you can experiment with the content in custom ads to see how leads respond. And if you need help setting up paid ad campaigns, set up an initial consulting call.

Even if you don’t intend to use Yelp’s premium services, you can get control of your business page and interact with consumers just by claiming your free business listing.

That leaves me with just one question: 

Have you taken advantage of your free Yelp business listing yet?

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